What we know about homeless people killed in Sacramento storms; one had five kids
READ MORE
Northern California Storms
Click on the arrow below to read more on the storms and flooding in Sacramento and Northern California.
Expand All
At least two homeless people died in Sacramento over the weekend when high winds caused trees to fall on top of their tents.
Rebekah Rohde, 40, died Saturday along the American River Parkway near North Fifth Street in the River District, just north of downtown, according to the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office.
On Sunday, Steven Sorensen, 61, died along Roseville Road near Tri Stations Road in North Highlands.
Both were well known in the communities where they lived. Their family members and neighbors mourned them on Monday while advocates said their deaths showed the county should open thousands more warming center beds during the winter storms that are in the forecast.
Rohde, originally from Minnesota, had five children, all of whom still live there, said Sedona Rohde, her daughter.
“She loved baking, she used to make her own bread,” Rohde, 20, said. “She loved the outdoors and art, painting and doing crafts with us. She liked biking and hiking and loved books a lot. She practically had a library when we were growing up. She home schooled a lot of us for our early years.”
On Monday afternoon, Rohde’s gray and blue tent was still sitting a few feet from the high river, a large tree laying across the top of it. A green jacket from her friend David Howard, which he gave her to shield from the rain, still hangs from the tree.
It’s unclear when Rohde got to Sacramento or what brought her here.
But she has been wanting to go home to her kids, said Victoria Salazar Rogers, her friend who camps nearby along the river.
“She’s been wanting to go home,” Rogers, 54, said. “But she was always happy. She was like my sister. Every day she’d cook and bring me some.”
On Monday Rogers and her husband were putting their tent back together and trying to dry off their belongings along the river bank. She can’t go to the warming center that’s just a couple blocks away because she has four dogs, she said.
“Everybody’s life is something and does matter,” Rogers said.
Rohde’s family has started a GoFundMe to raise money for funeral expenses.
Sorensen, who went by “Skip,” loved his pit bull named Baby Girl, and had been unhoused for years, said Susan Hunter, a friend who camps nearby.
“He loved to play dice, he could play it all day,” Hunter said. “He was a really nice guy. He’d give you the shirt off his back.”
Sorensen was killed next to Regional Transit’s Roseville Road light rail station, a location eyed from a homeless shelter in a 2021 city plan that largely did not materialize.
A series of atmospheric river storms have been slamming Sacramento since New Year’s Eve. Wind speeds over the weekend hit over 60 mph, toppling power lines, trees, and closing schools. It was the worst storm to hit Sacramento since January 2021, but that storm did not cause any homeless deaths due to fallen trees.
The coroner has not yet determined if there were any homeless deaths caused by hypothermia during the storm. A man died in November of hypothermia near Camp Polluck on a night without wind or rain.
The city and county have opened several homeless warming centers, including near the death sites — two in the River District and one along Auburn Boulevard. The city’s warming centers have not been at capacity, said Tim Swanson, city spokesman. The centers will stay open until Thursday.
The number of warming center spaces totals less than 1,000. The city and county additionally support about 2,300 shelter beds. There are roughly 9,300 homeless people in Sacramento.
Despite the warming centers, activists say the city and county could have done more to get people indoors in greater numbers, such as opening the huge Cal Expo campus. The County Board of Supervisors last week discussed doing that, but has not done so.
“The deaths of Ms. Rohde and Mr. Sorensen are heartbreaking since their untimely deaths were preventable had the city and county provides emergency shelter to the scale of our homeless crisis,” said Bob Erlenbusch of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. “How many deaths of our unhoused neighbors will it take for the city and county to create solutions to ending and preventing homelessness to the scale of the need?”
This story was originally published January 9, 2023 at 1:07 PM.
.JPG)
